The
Greenmantle / Etter Selections

To maximize his chances at success, a fruit breeder
should start young and live a long life. Albert Etter did just this,
but he still wasn't able to bring his work to completion and safeguard
his varietal legacy. When he died in 1950, there seemed to be no one
interested in carrying on the work or sorting out all the unfinished
business of variety evaluation and selection......

Albert Etter: His work not quite finished....

As the years passed, much worthy fruit was probably lost to windstorms,
lightning strikes, marauding bears, and itchy cattle. Neglect, while
not always benign, was probably not as harmful as misguided attention.
Etter's foundation trees - some bearing up to twenty different grafted
varieties - could not withstand the onslaught of a pruning crew mainly
interested in smokewood. Who knows how many pomological treasures went
up in smoke? So now, more than fifty years after Etter's death, almost
nothing of his once magnificent apple experiment remains standing........

Ettersburg
- "Just like paradise"....Lost

* * * * * * * * * *

Our family entered the picture in the mid-1970's, back when there were
still a large number of interesting trees to explore. Over the course
of the next two decades, we spent hundreds of hours wandering through
the ruins of Etter's lifework, searching for fruit worth saving from
oblivion. We managed to "rediscover" several of the original Etter
apple introductions: these included Etter's Gold, Katharine, Jonwin, Wickson, and Crimson
Gold. But the most exciting part of our exploration turned out to be
finding Etter's unnamed trial varieties that were yet to be evaluated.

In
the Etter Orchard circa 1985

After many seasons of sampling and collecting, we
focused our attention on a small number of exceptional apples that we
deemed worthy of naming, propagating, and introducing through our nursery.
These GREENMANTLE / ETTER SELECTIONS fall into two
general categories:

1. The pink-fleshed apples ( of the same type as Pink
Pearl and also derived from seed of the Surprise apple) that we call
the Rosetta™ Hybrids

and

2. The small confectionary apples of obvious crabapple heritage (along
the lines of the Wickson and Crimson Gold type) that we have designated
the Sweetmeat™ Crab
Hybrids